This also, if only the time permitted, in what fulness would I not be able to lay before you! Who is there, for example, who would not, as we have done, regard joy as something evidently good in itself, if only it were not joy in what is bad. Nor has there been any lack of writers on ethics who have asserted that pleasure and the good were strictly identical conceptions.[58] Opposed to these were others who bore witness to the inner worth of insight and such will be supported by all unprejudiced minds. Many philosophers have wished to exalt knowledge above all else as the highest good.[59] They recognized, however, at the same time, a certain inner worth in each act of virtue, while others have carried this view so far as to recognize only in virtuous action the highest good.[60] On the one hand, therefore, we have had sufficient confirmatory tests in support of our view. Next with regard to the principles of choice, how often do we not see the principle of summation applied as, for example, when it is said that the measure of the happiness of life as a whole and not that of the passing moment is to be considered.[61] And, again, passing beyond the limits of the self, when, for example, Aristotle says, that the happiness of a nation seems to be a higher end than that of an individual happiness,[62] and that in the same way in a work of art, or in an organism and similarly in the case of the family, the part always exists for the sake of the whole; everything is here subordinate to the “common” (“εἰς τὀ κοινόν”).[63] Even in the case of the whole creation he makes the same principle hold good. “In what,” he asks,[64] “regarding all created things consists the good, and the best, which is its final aim”? Is it immanent or transcendent? And he answers: “Both,” setting forth as the transcendent aim the divine first cause, likeness to which everything strives after, while the immanent aim is the world-order as a whole. The like testimony to the principle of summation might be taken from the lips of the Stoics.[65] It reappears in every attempt to construct a theodicy from Plato down to Leibnitz and even later.[66] In the precepts of our popular religion, again, the operation of this principle is also distinctly visible. When it ordains us to love our neighbour as ourselves, what else is taught but that, in the right choice, equality (be it our own or that of others) shall fall with equal weight into the balance, from which follows the subordination of the single individual to the good of the collective whole; just as the ethical ideal of Christianity--the Saviour--offers himself as a sacrifice for the salvation of the world. And when it is said: “Love God above all else” (and Aristotle also says that God is much rather to be called the best than the world as a whole),[67] here also there is a special application of the law of summation. For how else do we think of God than as the sum of all that is good raised to an infinite degree?